this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
340 points (98.9% liked)
xkcd
17319 readers
2 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Which only makes sense if you view it as “nobody wants to change.”
We just “Star Wars’d” it. The first episode is episode 3, but it’s not the first in the storyline.
It would be tricky to change a designation after the fact. If you retroactively designated all "Population I" stars as "Population II", then from then on every time you read any scientific literature you'd have to figure out when it was written so you'd know what they meant by it, and for stuff written around the time of the transition you'd have to ask the authors what they meant directly, and--
Language is supposed to make communication easier. Ambiguity in terms inevitably does the opposite.